Date: Wed, 6 Mar 1996 04:04:25 -0500 (EST)
From: "Greg J. Seigworth" <gseigwor-AT-marauder.millersv.edu>
Subject: RE[2]: sub-substance




Ed, 

Yes!  Absolutely an important correction to make (and certainly not
nitpicking!).  It does sound, re-reading my original post now, as if I've
separated off the principles of passion and principles of association a
bit too neatly.  Not what I intended.  Association, as Deleuze remarks
somewhere in _E&S_ (temporarily unable to locate the precise page), is for
the sake of the passions.  Your point about affectivity is also
well-taken. Although Deleuze really only devotes a single page in _E&S_ to
affectivity (and its connection to 'circumstance'), it is key to his
reading of Hume and brings these principles together.  "Affectivity is a
matter of circumstances.  These are precisely the variables [affect and
circumstance] that define our passions and interests.  Understood in this
way, a set of circumstances always individuates a subject since it
represents a state of passions and needs, an allocation of interests, a
distribution of beliefs and exhilirations.  As a result, we see that the
principles of passions must be combined with the principles of association
in order for the subject to constitute itself within the mind.  If the
principles of association explain that ideas are associated, only the
principles of passions can explain that a particular idea, rather than
another, is associated at a given moment"  (_E&S_. p.103).  And, thus, we
can arrive at practical subjectivity and not a theoretical one.  As
Deleuze writes in the book's second to last sentence: "Philosophy must
constitute itself as the theory of what we are doing, not as a theory of
what there is" (133).  I'd argue, too, that 'affectivity' or affect might
be the one term that, if you follow it through the whole of Deleuze's
work, may be most revealing about just what it is that Deleuze was up to
and about why he passes through certain thinkers / concepts / terrain and
not others. _This_ is a book that I wouldn't mind writing or, more likely,
reading: should it ever come into existence.  (Massumi's most recent work,
for one, seems to be moving towards a further elaboration of affect ...
and it [affect] is the subject of my dissertation so, of course, I'm
determined to believe that it's at the center of the universe!)

And I know what you mean about Hume being 'truly maddening' ...  which is
also probably why Deleuze turns to Spinoza to develop and refine these
speculations on ontological practice and a genealogy of substance and he
never much looks back again at Hume [though he pops up in _Dialogues_ and
the last chapter of _WiP?_] on these particular matters.  Deleuze does, of
course, hang on to H's empiricism with its externality of relations, the
substitution of the concept of belief for knowledge, the contraction of
habit, the role of the imagination, etc. 

Greg

p.s. Millersville is maybe 35-40 miles from Villanova, I think.  And 
almost as many IQ points (at least, in my case).

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